Necropolis
by Stellaluna
Summary: Hideous city of unknown words; that's where I live when I go to sleep.


**Spoilers:** None**  
Rating:** PG for adult themes**  
Disclaimer:** None of these are mine. Characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS, and Alliance Atlantis.**  
Archive:** Please ask.

Claire kisses him, and her open mouth is full of dust.

He takes a step back from her embrace, and realizes as he does that there's dust on him now, too, coating his tongue and lips and sliding in a slow drift down the front of his shirt. He brushes at it, trying to get it off, but all it does is coat his hands, and there is grit everywhere, under his nails and on his palms and creeping beneath his cuffs.

He looks at Claire, who's standing in front of him, wanting to ask her why, where all this came from. But her eyes are blank and white now, and she's smiling as the gray dust continues to pour from her mouth, turning her blind face up to his. He backs up again, and it comes to him that this is graveyard dust, that he's coated in the dirt from someone's grave, and it's usually around this point that he wakes up.

-

-

-

There's a dead woman in the alley on Avenue A, glazed open eyes staring up toward the night sky and blood pooling underneath her from the stab wound in her belly. He sets his case on the ground at the mouth of the alley and pulls on a fresh pair of gloves, dry powder snap against his wrists, then starts to walk the scene. He's noting evidence (it's not a robbery; her purse is on the ground and Danny finds her wallet intact inside, and she's still wearing what looks like all her jewelry), but his attention keeps being drawn back to the corpse. The victim.

She's not so different from an unknown number of other corpses he's viewed over the years. Whatever the motivation behind this murder may be, and he already knows that if it's not a botched mugging, it's going to be something ugly, the cause of death appears to be straightforward. Stab wound to the gut, and sure, it's a nasty way to die, but again, it's almost normal. In comparison to some of the more exotic murder scenes he's had to work, this is nothing.

What troubles him is her eyes. He wishes they were closed. The gaze of the dead is undefined. It has to be; that's just the way it is. He can stand over this woman and look down into her cold face, and he can read anything he wants into those wide-open eyes: accusation, fear, anger. But that's all it would be: reading. Literary criticism performed on the human body. He'd be doing nothing more than enforcing his own inevitably biased interpretation upon a blank slate. It's something he can't afford to do, and it flies in the face of his professional code of ethics. _Stay neutral, you have to stay neutral or you'll go crazy. Worse, you'll see something in a crime scene that isn't there._ Getting sloppy, making a mistake, is unacceptable.

But he wishes her eyes were closed.

Now Danny is walking the alley while he crouches by the woman's side, running the beam of his flashlight up and down her body. Seeing if anything, any little bit of evidence, jumps out at him before he has to touch. Before he moves her and scrapes under her nails, and shifts her clothes, and in doing so perhaps unknowingly destroys some key piece to the puzzle.

He shines his flashlight into her eyes. The pupils don't dilate, but remain fixed points in her iris. _Blank slate,_ he thinks again. Early forensic scientists experimented with the theory that the last thing a person saw before he or she died would be imprinted on the cornea, and tried to find ways to retrieve the pictures. It hadn't been true, of course, he knows with his 21st-century hindsight, but it would have been a boon.

Instead, he turns his head, looking up, following what he calculates would be the focus of her gaze if she were still able to see. The walls of the buildings, a rusting fire escape, a night sky too obscured by pollution and electric lights for any stars to be seen. And when he looks down, it's him she's staring at instead of the sky.

He's halfway to reaching out, intending to shut the lids of her eyes and absolve himself, when Danny calls to him to come look at something. Realization hits him then, hard, what he almost did, and he has to shut his own eyes for a second to stop the vertigo that threatens to overtake him. A minor lapse; he wasn't thinking for a second. Getting to his feet, he goes over to where Danny stands by the side of a dumpster, and he tells himself to put the whole thing out of his mind.

-

-

-

The empty city is filled with the sound of whispering voices. They're just low enough that he can't be sure he's hearing them at all, or if they're nothing more than the wind in his ears, coupled with an act of imagination. He can never make out any words, but they murmur at him constantly on the deserted avenues and in the aisles of abandoned stores.

He doesn't even know if "abandoned" is the right word; he's never seen any other people here, and doesn't know if there ever were any. He got on a train at Astor Place and got off at Arkham Street (which he's never heard of before), and found himself in a Manhattan that shouldn't exist. The streets run in the wrong directions and the building names are unfamiliar, and yet he seems to know this place intimately. He can't figure it, and can't find his crime lab or another subway station, and so he walks constantly, searching for something that'll lead him back to the places he knows.

In the narthex of what may be Grace Church, he crosses himself with holy water before venturing into the nave. The place is Episcopalian and not Catholic, he remembers, but it's close enough for his purposes. It's the first church he's found in his walks through the city, and though it's bright daylight outside, here the entire place is hung about with shadows. That barely registers on his consciousness; what does draw his attention is the woman kneeling at a bank of offering candles.

As he walks toward her, he realizes that the murmuring voices have fallen silent for the first time, unable, perhaps, to cross the church threshold. Drawing nearer, he thinks at first that the woman is Stella -- the hair and build look about right -- and is about to call her name when she finishes her prayer and stands up, and as she turns to face him he realizes his mistake. The woman's hair is straight, not curly, and both her height and figure are all wrong. Not Stella at all, then, and of course it's not, because why would Stella be in this bent city?

"Claire," he says instead, and he thinks that his heart should leap at this moment, but all he feels is a slow twist of fear in his stomach. She smiles and nods and holds her hands out to him -- no dust on her lips this time, he's grateful to see -- and he takes her by the upper arms, looking down into her unmarked face. Though a number of questions occur to him, he's unable, for now, to voice any of them.

She stretches up on her toes and whispers into his ear: "Tell me your secret name."

He blinks. "My -- what?"

She puts her hands on his face, and her hands are running red with blood.

-

-

-

In the blessedly sane light of the bathroom, he runs the water in the sink until it's nearly hot enough to scald, and stares at himself in the mirror. His eyes are wide and staring, cheeks sunken and dotted with stubble, and in some rational corner of his mind he remembers that it's been two days since he shaved.

He can hear traffic going by up on the boulevard, and a neighbor's television somewhere in the building, and these things help him to assert reality. He's here in his Brooklyn apartment, and beyond the walls lies the real city and its millions of inhabitants. He will not walk out the front door and find anything that can't be explained by science or economics. Claire is still dead.

Nights he can sleep, which is few of them, are almost worse than all the nights he walks the floor or the Promenade or simply sits up in his office for hours. Because sleep brings dreams, and the dreams...are bad. He's a rational man, not prone to superstition or to jumping at shadows. Too bad he has to remind himself of this every time he wakes up with his heart racing and a choked-off cry in his throat.

He stares at himself in the mirror for a heartbeat more, then feels a rush of frustration. _Enough of this,_ and he reaches over to turn on the shower. He'll shave and get cleaned up and get dressed, he decides, pulling his old USMC t-shirt over his head, and then just go into the lab early. It's not like he doesn't have work to do there. It's not like it ever stops.

-

-

-

Sometimes he looks at Stella, or Danny, and all he can see is the skull beneath the skin. This happens most often after the dreams have been very bad, days when he walks around with post-midnight shudders of horror running down his spine every time he flashes on one of the images from his broken bouts of REM sleep. And he thinks maybe it's better this way, because if he forgot, he might let one of them get close, might let them touch him. He can't risk that.

On other days, when he hasn't been dreaming, when the only thing he has to contend with is the fog daze of insomnia, all he can do is shake his head at these thoughts, and wonder why his imagination seems to take its cues from Gothic horror novels. If he's going to be morbid, he thinks with a rare (and almost unrecognized) flash of humor, he could at least find a way to be practical about it.

-

-

-

He can smell the damp salt sea, and even the wind has a sodium tang to it that he can almost taste. There's something heavy about ocean air; it creeps in and around him even with the windows closed, here in this empty beach house with its bare wood floors. He presses the palm of his hand flat against the pane, and his fingers sketch meaningless patterns in the salt.

"You could derail the trains," Claire whispers in his ear, and one icy little hand slides up his chest. He looks out at the Atlantic Ocean. He doesn't look behind him.

"I couldn't," he says.

"Oh, but you could. It's what you want, isn't it?" Her body against his back, a brush of heavy silk on his spine, and still that cold hand stroking his chest.

"I -- no."

"Look, then," and her whisper is now a hiss.

He looks, _keeps_ looking, out the window at the Atlantic. And he sees, now, his mistake: it isn't the Atlantic at all, but the East River. Water drips from the ceiling above his head, and the walls are running with rivulets of damp. Not a beach house, then, either, but a tunnel beneath the river. The floor beneath his feet beats in a steady thrum, the way the subway platform does at the approach of a train. A far-off burst of static resolves itself into a crackling voice, and he stands still and listens, the way he's done a hundred times before.

_Ladies and gentlemen, all Brooklyn-bound N and R train service is delayed at this time, due to a sick passenger at Prince Street. Repeat, there is a delay in all Brooklyn-bound N and R service. To continue your trip downtown, please change at --_

"There's never really a sick passenger," he says to Claire after the announcement fades out. "That's a euphemism."

"Isn't that what you want?" she asks again.

"No," he says, and he closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the glass, and says it over and over again as Claire's nails dig into his chest and she continues to whisper into his ear. "No, no, no..."

-

-

-

When he finally wakes up, for fear of his immortal soul, he says the Act of Contrition. Quietly, to himself, though there's no one around to hear.

-

-

-

At some point that winter, he wanders uptown to the main branch of the public library, where he chases mentions of graveyard dust through obscure reference books. He is unsurprised to find that it's an essential ingredient in a number of _Vodoun _curses, and is struck, as well, by the number of common points he finds between Voodoo and the religion he was raised in. Leaving the library in the winter dusk, he wonders if he could hang a pipe in a doorway and have Papa Legba answer his prayers. All of the others, the ones to whom he's been taught to appeal, have turned deaf ears to him.

He does believe he's cursed, not by arcane ritual, but by the cold fact of being alive, of breathing and his own awareness. Claire, fixed in time, and out of this mess in any event, is the lucky one. He, always the soldier, is the one stuck on this ceaseless patrol, fighting a war he's never going to win.

Despite all the bad dreams and thoughts of magic, he knows what's real and what's not; he's not crazy. This is, like so much else he's done, nothing more than a futile attempt to categorize and quantify what's happened. Knowing it's a fool's errand doesn't mean he gets to stop trying.

He stands swaying on the crowded train, fighting to keep his eyes open as he watches the other passengers come and go, and when the train jerks to a halt in the tunnel, all he does is lean against the door and wait. Here, in this dead-struck city, there's nothing but time, and rest is very far away.


End file.
